The Augustus of Prima Porta is a marble statue of Augustus Caesar in the Villa Livia at Prima Porta, near Rome, in Italy. The statue is a copy of a bronze work that was commissioned by the Roman Senate in 20 B.C.; the date it was made is unknown. It is now located in the Vatican Museum.

There are two famous Invisible Man books. One is a novel by Ralph Ellison which deals with questions of African-American civil rights and identities in twentieth century America, and the other is a science fiction novella by H.G. Wells in which a man becomes irreversibly invisible.

In the H.G. Wells novel, as Richard describes, the apparent 'gift' of invisibility soon becomes a curse, driving Griffin, the invisible man, insane. The book was adapted into a film in 1933.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was an American writer, credited with inventing the detective genre of fiction with his 1841 story The Murders in the Rue Morgue, which featured the detective Auguste Dupin. His stories are known for their macabre, supernatural tone.

The Etruscan civilisation existed in pre-Roman Italy in the area roughly corresponding to that of modern Tuscany. The civilisation flourished from around 700 B.C. until it was absorbed into the expanding Roman Empire in the first century B.C. It is known for its individual language and culture, which included an unique style of figurative art seen in ancient frescoes and terracotta statues. The Villa Guilia in Rome is home to the National Etruscan Museum.

Georg Hegel (1770-1831) was an enormously influential German philosopher. He developed a number of important concepts integrated into a complex philosophical system based on the ideas of rationalism, contradiction and progress. He argued that contradiction was part of the evolution of ideas, and of history, and of a unifying concept he called the Absolute. In his wonderful book A History of Western Philosophy Bertrand Russell describes Hegel's writing as the single most difficult to understand; he's not the best choice of writer for Richard to read while he recovers.

Vivien Leigh (1913-1967) was an English actress, most famous for her role as Scarlett O'Hara in the film Gone With the Wind and as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire. A noted stage actress with a career spanning thirty years, Leigh was married for a time to the actor and director Laurence Olivier.

The Sitwells were three English siblings (Edith, Oswell and Sacheverell), all writers who were prominent in the early twentieth century literary world. At the time, their literary clique was considered to rival that of the Bloomsbury group, but since then their perceived importance has declined.

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" breathing deep and slapping his chest, like Oliver Douglas in the opening sequence of 'Green Acres' "